Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/541

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The Green Bag.

strange actios raised by the soi-disant Princess Olive, and the prosecution of the Manchester " martyrs." He was also en gaged in the great Matlock Will case, when Lord Chief-Justice Cockburn was almost persuaded to believe in expert testimony by the remarkable evidence of the lithographer, Charles Chabot (1816--1882.) In 1865 Sir James Hannen made an unsuccessful at tempt in the Liberal interest to oust Mr. Stephen Cave, the Tory M. P. for New Shoreham. But his politics were impotent to destroy his privilege as Treasury devil; and in 1868, on the death of Sir William Shee, — less known as a judge than as the advocate that offended Palmer,— Hannen received simultaneously the vacant Justice ship and the honor of Knighthood. He was made Judge-ordinary of the Court of Probate, in succession to Lord Penzance in 1872, and three years later was raised to his present position,— the Presidentship of the newly constituted " Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division." Sir James Hennen's leading judgments are well known; most lawyers have heard of Niboyet v. Niboyet, the Frederick Legiti macy Trial, Durham v. Durham, Sugden v. St. Leonards (where the will of the great ex-Chancellor was established by secondary evidence), Gladstone v. Gladstone, and Crawford v. Dilke. We propose, however, to allude particularly to the services that this distinguished Judge has rendered to the law of lunacy. Mr. Justice Holmes, whose treatise on " The Common Law " is as popular in England as in America, has fami liarized us with the conception of an "external standard," whereto " the average man " must at his proper peril conform. "The law," says this profound and accom plished writer, " takes no account of the in finite varieties of temperament, intellect, and education which make the internal character of a given act so different in different men. The law considers what would be blame worthy in the average man, the man of or dinary intelligence and prudence, and deter

mines liability by that." Now, an " external standard " is all very well when one has an "average man " to deal with; but there arose a generation of judges in England that sought to determine by rigid " external" formula; the capacity and the responsibility of the insane. About the year 1840 the French theory of manie sans cttlire was nat uralized in England, under the now historic name of " moral insanity." The Englishspeaking exponents of this theory exag gerated, if indeed they did not miscon ceive it; and the plea of " moral insanity " or "irresistible impulse " was regularly set up in criminal cases, whenever any other defence was obviously untenable. No sooner was the arm of Justice raised to strike, than the medical expert plucked her sleeve, and sought to paralyze the blow. The English judges rallied bravely against this apotheosis of wickedness, and insisted that if moral insan ity, thus interpreted, were a disease, the proper hospital for its treatment was the tread mill of the scaffold. The Rules in Macnaghten's case (1843), which made a knowledge of right and wrong the test of responsibility in mental alienation, gave formal expression to the judicial dislike of " moral insanity." The external standard thus erected for juri dical use was speedily trampled upon and broken by the triumphant feet of hostile critics. It was pointed out that to suppose a lunatic capable of reasoning sanely upon his delusions was absurd, and a formidable array of cases was drawn up to show that a knowledge of right and wrong might coexist with a diseased inability to apply that knowl edge to a particular set of circumstances. But the worst enemy of the old judicial theory was himself a lawyer, and a very emiment one. Mr. (now Sir) James Fitz James Stephen wrote a paper on the Rules in Macnaghten's case for the Juridical Society, • and argued that they were quite wide enough to protect those who were in fact " morally insane." So Dr. Newman " tested the elasticity " of the Articles beneath the very nose of Oxford orthodoxy! Little more was